Hercules And Love Affair - Hercules And Love Affair Review

Brooklyn scenester, classics polymath, DJ and producer Andrew Butler is on a one-man mission to raise up disco. This maligned form of dance music suffered from the '80s fallout of Aids, Donna Summer's religious visions and, if we're honest, Boney M. If any genre needed rehabilitating, disco is surely at the front of the queue.

Butler, on Hercules And Love Affair's intoxicating, pathos-soaked but thoroughly modern eponymous debut, makes clear his intent to return gay disco to the pantheon of art forms. His method for so doing relies in equal parts on referencing Greek myths and their gay storylines, and utilising a veritable tombola of guest stars in a soundscape that calls to mind Divine and Yazoo....full text In past years, it definitely seems to me at least, that every year is a good year for the electronic(a) genre. Last year was a supposed weak year for hip-hop/rap, the year before we didn’t have a lot of solid rock albums and the list goes on. Well, 2008 is no different in terms of electronic music. Almost four months in and we have a great set of albums to add to our CD racks....full text It is difficult to conjure up a period in pop history that evokes quite the same sense of glamour, sex appeal, style-fascist elitism and widescreen fun that marks New York and its discos in the years between 1978 and 1984. It was an era simply bristling with possibilities: the idea of music as pure release, the euphoria of freeing oneself from introspection, the partial brainlessness of dancing towards nirvana. Given its persuasive cross-cultural popularity, it's astonishing that disco hasn't been used more regularly as a cultural touchstone in the decades since. Welcome then, if you will, Hercules and Love Affair's very 2008 variant on the genre....full text